Why is Milton’s poetry so little read today?

When I tried to learn practical criticism at university I was told that the point of poetry was to find the appropriate language in which to express elevated thoughts. Wordsworth added something about the poet doing this “in reflection”, a word he used in its 18th-century sense to mean deep or serious thought. Romantics such as he and Coleridge thought profoundly about life, landscape, nature and beauty. Yet Wordsworth revered more than anyone else a poet from the 17th century for whom a dramatic spontaneity and the religious imagination were fundamental: John Milton.

“Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart,” Wordsworth wrote of him. “Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea / Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free”. Today Milton is occasionally studied for English A-level, as if he were worthy, yet dispensable. However, to some of us he is the greatest poet in the English language. His choice of diction is always original and therefore arresting. Time spent with the Oxford English Dictionary will soon show how many words he brought into our vocabulary, from the Latin and Greek of which he was a master. He also, as befits a blind man, has a stunning visual sense: when millions of fallen angels draw their flaming swords in Paradise Lost and “the sudden blaze / Far round illumin’d Hell”, Milton depicts a vivid moment with remarkable economy of words. His use of rhythm in his blank verse is intensely musical; his command of the sonnet form is finer than Spenser’s, and no worse than that ascribed to Shakespeare.

So why is Milton so little read now? Perhaps as this is a secular age his predominantly religious subjects – not just Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, but also Samson Agonistes – have little appeal. Yet in these works we see, and hear, what Wordsworth meant by “majestic”. Is there anything grander than the opening of the second book of Paradise Lost, or more ironic, given whom it describes: “High on a throne of royal state, which far / Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, / Or where the farthest East with richest hand / Showers on her Kings barbaric pearl and gold, / Satan exalted sat, by merit raised / To that bad eminence”. Sometimes Milton is like an art house screenplay. One should not be deterred by the subject, any more than one should be deterred from reading the King James Bible or the 1662 Prayer Book just because one is not an Anglican. The sheer beauty of the words, and the musicality for which they are chosen, are among the characteristics that make Milton great.

Gustave Dore's fall of the rebel angels, from Book I of Paradise Lost

To see his breadth, read his English sonnets: they are contemporary (as in his exhortation of Oliver Cromwell), reflective (as on his painful memories of his deceased wife), polemical (notably about religion), humorous (his sonnet defending his pamphlet Tetrachordon) and movingly humble. That last judgment applies to his most famous sonnet, “On His Blindness”, in which he promises to serve God dutifully however he can – “Thousands at his bidding speed / And post oe’r land and ocean without rest: /They also serve who only stand and wait”.

But for most of his life, until the death of Cromwell (to whom he had been Latin secretary, composing all his diplomatic correspondence), poetry was a sideline for Milton. It was only after 1658, when he began to compose Paradise Lost, and especially after 1660, when with the Restoration there was a warrant for his arrest as a collaborator with the regicides and he decided, wisely, to keep a low profile, that he had the time and the seclusion to write verse. But admirers of Milton know that he was as good a polemicist as he was a poet, and during the 1640s and 1650s wrote several of the greatest works of political argument in the canon. They came from the heart, covering subjects that deeply affected or annoyed him.

Unhappily married, he wrote two powerful pamphlets on the need to have a divorce law, powerful because he used his considerable theological expertise to argue that there were biblical justifications for the state to put an end to marriages. He was a fervent supporter of the Reformation and wrote in its defence; and in Areopagitica, published in 1644, he made an argument still unanswerable today for the press to be allowed to remain free of censorship.

Milton is worth reading for the simple reason of experiencing the beauty of words used intelligently and carefully. But he is also an intensely modern writer of prose, as relevant to the 21st century as he was to the 17th, and in that timelessness as much as in his stylistic genius lies his abiding greatness.